The EuroSearch project
aims to help restore the linguistic and cultural equilibrium
on the Web by building a pan-European federation of national
search and categorization services. Initially comprising
services from Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, the EuroSearch
federation will constitute a distributed, multilingual
searching service, permitting users to enter queries in their
own, or their preferred language, and to carry out search and
information retrieval over some or all of the federation's
national sites. Each national site will be responsible for
maintaining and operating a search service dedicated to its
own language, so that the needs of each language community
will be catered for by native speakers of that language.

At the same time, particular attention will be paid to
ensuring that the Eurosearch framework is open and extensible
to countries and services which are not currently represented,
while the consortium will actively promote the federation
concept with a view to future enlargement.

The Eurosearch federation will be supported, in this important
and highly competitive area, by enhancements to existing
services which will improve the quality of Web search and
information retrieval. In addition to a common user interface,
to be implemented in each local language, together with
mechanisms for automatically redirecting queries to the
appropriate partners according to user language, profile, and
stated requirements, the project will also develop techniques
which allow for more subject- oriented querying of information
via the automatic classification of Web information
according to its content, and will also cross language
retrieval, where a query expressed in one language can
retrieve information expressed in a different language.

The project will therefore make a concrete contribution to the
realisation of an open, multilingual Information Society, by
simplifying and extending access to Web information in and
across a number of different European languages. On the one
hand, information providers will benefit in that their
information is made accessible to the widest possible
audience, irrespective of the language in which it is
expressed, while on the other seekers of information will
benefit from a more congenial access to information, adapted
to their own cultural and linguistic environment.